Director, Flight Systems, Blue Origin

Formerly, Director of Innovation & Product Development at FlightSafety Int.

Board Member Tulsa Air & Space Museum

The Paradox of Safety: How 100 Years of Aviation Engineering Can Still Fail Pilots

Wednesday, March 5 @ 13:00 (Wong Auditorium)

Despite our best engineering efforts to design advanced safety systems, unintended consequences can still emerge in the airplane cockpit.  Walking through several case studies of prominent air disasters, I explore how well-trained pilots, flying fully operational airplanes, can fall into error traps in the interaction between automated systems and human behavior.

Senior Director, Strategy & Engineering BAE Systems

Global Engineering Fellow

CISSP, OSWP, OSCP, OSCE, OSEE, CNDA, Safe Agilist

An Architectural Perspective on Securing AIML-Enabled Systems 

Wednesday, March 5 @ 19:00 (MIT Museum)

This paper presents research findings that initially focused on securing embedded AI components within cyber-physical systems. Our original goal was to protect AI/ML implementations from adversarial attacks, data poisoning, and other emerging threats specific to intelligent systems deployed in critical infrastructure environments.

However, during this research, we unintentionally discovered a cyber-systems engineering approach that facilitates the systematic design of zero-trust architecture. This serendipitous finding arose from applying AI security principles to broader system trust relationships, illustrating how solutions developed for one domain can unexpectedly address challenges in another. We are continuing this research today as we formalize Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods, algorithms, and tools for establishing provable zero-trust in architecture models described through MBSE methodologies.

Professor and Alexander Crombie Humphreys Chair Professor in Economics of Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology

IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Smart Cities Member

IEEE Smart Cities Technical Community Steering Committee Member

Global Power Systems Transformation Power System Architecture Reference Architecture of the National Electricity Market International Expert Panel

Adapting Convergent Systems-of-Systems with Hetero-functional Graph Theory

Friday, March 5 @ 13:00 (Wong Auditorium)

Humans have made profound and irreversible changes to the Earth; leaving societal challenges that are numerous and daunting.  Be it stabilizing carbon emissions, managing the nitrogen cycle, or providing access to clean water, each societal challenge is so large and complex in its own right that each might seem entirely intractable.  To adapt to each compelling challenge, we must converge knowledge that collectively spans almost every discipline.  And yet, these seemingly disconnected challenges are actually intertwined in Systems-of-Systems (SoS).  A convergent initiative to address a single societal challenge is likely to be uncoordinated with, and counter-productive to, another convergent effort directed at another societal challenge.  Our single-discipline-single-problem thinking must evolve to one of multi-discipline-multi-problem thinking. 

This presentation advocates for a SoS Convergence Paradigm founded in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Hetero-Functional Graph Theory (HFGT).  The paradigm views societal challenges as a SoS that is analyzed and re-synthesized using a meta-cognition knowledge-generation map and skill set.  MBSE converges ontological terms in the Systems Modeling Language (SysML), and HFGT translates these SysML models into mathematical and computational models to unlock multiple methodological advantages.   In system structure, HFGT overcomes the ontological limitations of multi-layer networks.  In system behavior, HFGT has reconciled system dynamics models and been proven to generalize linear graphs, bond graphs, and process-based life cycle analysis.  In system optimization, the hetero-functional network minimum cost flow problem generalizes well-known operations research problems including the traveling salesman and generalized multi-commodity flow problems.  These methodological advantages are demonstrated in our understanding of the American Multi-Modal Energy System, the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and Australia’s newly founded National Energy Analysis Centre.  The presentation concludes with the pedagogical implications for training a new generation of “Anthropocene Systems Integrators”.